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I found out yesterday that I’ve been shortlisted along with 17 other poets for Eyewear Publishing’s Christmas Fortnight Prize. This is the first time I’ve submitted to an award so I’m overjoyed they saw something in my work.

Eyewear are a small independent publishers based in London making some serious waves right now.

From the pitch blue that strikes
ache in the eye for trying
to find a bottom,
we carried into
Reeth under
an evil of colour.
Sundown bedraggled
with cloud-rips.
Lost I’d say, or left behind-
Red-sided
garter snake ecdysis,
vixen smeared
over an oily road;
or that thrift shop cardie
you’d never wear,
but for the soul of your mother,
can’t take your eye off.

Smokestacks that whispered into clouds
now slim cathedrals in dedication
to nocturnes of silk organs
periscopic in the system. Small crowds
of spiders boil from the lips.
in webs, wing dunes rise
resembling pumpkin pips;
the last rot of mulched flies.

Piston jellied stuck.
Ants march the shaft in a double-helix.
Moths choke the whistle cavity;
animate shadows of the nook.
In dust-light of oblivion
oily spectrums flash
from pulsing obsidian
of beetle backs.

Slime filigree fractures
suedes of decay,
drawing out continents
in the dust shale; pictures
etched by godly mollusk.
A new planet born
in backscatter musk.
A second first dawn.

Amputated carriages,
twitching still and world scattered,
hollow the core. A murderous
un-pegging of cargo marriages.
But empty bodies must be filled.
Each split chrysalis
and ghostless thing billed
a thriving new metropolis.